The other week a Comcast tech was out to install some new equipment. He was unsure whether an antenna could be placed outdoors, so he asked on a Comcast tech group chat. Within seconds he received a response from another tech: "Google it". It just amused me slightly that it's not just developers who get this response, and also made me a little bit mad because I know the frustration of being told to Google something even when I am asking in the right place.

This will be long and it's more of an IT rant, but I think it still fits.

So a user comes to me and says "hey on my phone I can't see anything in my junk email folder but there are a bunch of emails in there on my PC." I take a look at the Outlook app on his phone. The "Junk" folder that he has open is actually in his deleted items folder. So clearly it's not the real junk folder. There are no other folders named "Junk", but there is one named "Spam". I open that and there are a bunch of emails in there.

ME: "Does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "Oooohhh so you think it's called "Spam" instead of "Junk" on my phone?"
ME: "I'm not sure, does this look like what you were expecting to see?"
USER: "See, I always thought junk and spam were two different things."
ME: (grinding my teeth and taking a deep breath) "Does. This. Look. Like. What. You. Were. Expecting. To. See?"
USER: "Yeah, looks like it."

OK THEN FRICKING TAKE YOUR PHONE AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE.

I didn't really say that last bit, but I sure was tempted to.

I hate my coworker. I'm currently working in IT, but both my former full-time programming and my IT work has taught me how to dig for things and find them. He has learned this, and is CONSTANTLY bringing me things that have NOTHING to do with my job because he's too fricking LAZY to do it himself.

"Hey, there's a credit memo on this Amazon statement. I'd like to know what it was for, thanks."

SO LOG ONTO AMAZON AND LOOK FOR IT WITH YOUR OWN TWO EYEBALLS. I've got my own work to do without doing your AP detective work for you. THAT'S PART OF YOUR JOB.

But unfortunately I REALLY hate conflict and so I just do it for him, seething the whole time and knowing I've just reinforced the behavior.

EDIT: Before anyone says it, no it is not because he's stuck. If someone is at the end of their rope I'm glad to help them. But I've taken to asking him "so what have you tried?" And every single time he says "nothing." It's gotten to the point he'll literally say, "Hey can you do this for me? I haven't looked at it at all or tried anything." But he just doesn't catch on.

OK people, I don't need a novel written for every line of code, but PLEASE STOP trying to tell me that "yOuR coDe sHouLd bE sELf dOcUmeNtiNg aNd cOmMenTs mEaN iT's aUtoMaTiCaLLy bAd". That's a bunch of BS. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've saved my own butt by dropping a "this call can't be awaited; causes the library's internal API to throw an error" comment in my C#, or a "can't use double quotes here; doesn't work right for some reason" line in my JavaScript. Sometimes there are very good but un-obvious reasons why something was done a certain way, even though it looks like it could be done better. And don't try to tell me "the tests will catch it". Let's be realistic here, nobody has 100% test coverage on any project that's much more than "Hello World". And even if the tests DID catch it, why waste the time when you could just write a comment?

P.S.: This is not directed at anyone on here specifically. It's directed at all the devs I've met IRL and the comments I've seen on SO, who think that comments must be bad.

The place I'm interviewing for apparently has a "no music" policy. Is this common? Music is a huge part of programming for me. It helps me get into a rhythm and ignore all the little distractions like people tapping their feet, etc. that drive me absolutely crazy. Am I expecting too much here???